A tree-guided tour of the Eḻuttatikāram

In Rajan. K and Sivananantham. R (Eds), Proceedings, Muthamizh Arignar Kalaignar Centenary international seminar on Ancient Tamil Nadu, Government of Tamil Nadu, Department of Archaeology, 2023

The historical development of Tamil verbal morphology is outstandingly complex as it reflects several stages of development spanning several centuries (ca. 300 BCE-600 CE). Previous work on early Tamil, within the framework of historical linguistics, has made it clear that in the initial stage: 1) the bare stems without many morphological elements were used in different syntactic functions; 2) there was no categorial distinction between noun and verb; 3) the same inflexional material was used to encode various morphosyntactic functions; 4) the Tamil Finite Verb structure with fully developed pronominal suffixes is a later development; etc.

Emergence of Tamil as Epigraphic Language: Issues in Tamil Historical Linguistics 1 Appasamy Murugaiyan EPHE-Mondes iranien et indien, Paris "I am, however, of the opinion that it may not be quite safe to use this grammar [tolkāppiyam] as an absolute yardstick for measuring or estimating the chronology and the historical evolution of forms [of the śaṅgam texts]" (L. V. Ramaswami Aiyar, 1938:749) Language of Tamil Inscriptions and Historical Linguistics Given the diversity of Tamil corpus spread over the course of two millennia, Tamil has a lot to contribute to the field of historical linguistics in general. Every language changes over the time during the process of its transmission, and the structure of language, has thus become a case of constant and continued evolution. Generation after generation, as we can notice in the case of Tamil, new words are coined or borrowed, the meaning of old words drifts, morphology develops or decays, the syntactic structure has changed over time and in short the 'Modern Tamil' language as a whole has become different completely or partially while compared to that of Saṅgam literature, for instance. Otherwise we would not need a special training to read and interpret our old Saṅgam literature. A closer look at the language of Saṅgam shows how it has become distant and different from the 'Modern Tamil', and that they are not mutually intelligible. This is equally true with the language of Tamil inscriptions. These natural and progressive changes in the language defy the adequacy of the traditional grammars for the description of the language of the literary and inscriptional texts. We are forced to recreate grammar and lexicon based on the type of corpus we are encountered with. The Tamil epigraphic language has never existed as a monolithic and hermetically closed entity. Thus it is crucial to consider the Tamil epigraphic language, on the one hand, with more sociolinguistic implications, and on the other, with historical linguistic methods. Each Venkatachari K.K.A. 1978. The Maṇipravāḷa Literature of the ŚriVaiṣṇva Ācāriyas,

2013

Historical linguistics, among other things, aims at understanding the principles and factors that cause changes in languages. The Dravidian comparative linguistics in the last few decades has arrived at excellent results at different levels of language change: phonology, morphology and etymology. However, the field of historical syntax remains to be explored in detail. The linguistic analysis of Tamil inscriptions and classical and ancient literary texts will shed light on the historical linguistics of Tamil and will try to fill a gap in the historical linguistics of the Dravidian family of languages. An in-depth linguistic analysis of Tamil epigraphic texts will show how the Tamil language used in Tamil inscriptions constitutes an important diachronic evidence of both sociolinguistic and linguistic evolution. I will concentrate here on the following three aspects: 1) Historical sociolinguistics: Maṇipravāḷa style and the development of Tamil as Inscriptional Language, 2) Historical...

Historical linguistics, among other things, aims at understanding the principles and factors that cause changes in languages. The Dravidian comparative linguistics in the last few decades has arrived at excellent results at different levels of language change: phonology, morphology and etymology. However, the field of historical syntax remains to be explored in detail. The linguistic analysis of Tamil inscriptions and classical and ancient literary texts will shed light on the historical linguistics of Tamil and will try to fill a gap in the historical linguistics of the Dravidian family of languages. An in-depth linguistic analysis of Tamil epigraphic texts will show how the Tamil language used in Tamil inscriptions constitutes an important diachronic evidence of both sociolinguistic and linguistic evolution. I will concentrate here on the following three aspects: 1) Historical sociolinguistics: Maṇipravāḷa style and the development of Tamil as Inscriptional Language, 2) Historical linguistics, Syntax and Information structure, and 3) Construction of a fine-grained linguistic database and demonstrate how ‘corpus analysis’ can help us mapping the process of language change and language use.

2008

ABSTRACT: This article will explore the various conceptions underlying the use of the expression ticai-c-col (approximately “regional words”). After describing the role assigned to these by Tamil grammarians and Tamil grammatical commentators, we shall present a sketch of traditional Tamil linguistic geography, with its central and peripheral regions, and the way it has been reinterpreted in the course of history. We will also try to examine the actual linguistic data, the differences of opinion about it, and what they tell us about Tamil literature and the movement hiding below its classical surface.

2011

ABSTRACT: In writing a history of the Tamil Grammatical Tradition, one must try to make explicit the genesis, the constituent elements and the purpose of an ensemble that was gradually put together during the First Millenium of the Common Era. The main purpose of that collective endeavour seems to have been the detailed characterization of a refined language, which was possibly one of the components in a diglossic situation (analogous to that of Tamil today). That refined language would be used for the metrical composition (yāppu) by poets of a variety of poetical texts (ceyyuḷ) falling under different genres, the dominant one being pāṭṭu “song/verse”. As a consequence, we observe the simultaneous transmission of a poetical corpus, progressively enriched, and of a series of grammatical treatises. The oldest treatise available is the Tolkāppiyam, which gives in its penultimate chapter, the Ceyyuḷiyal, a characterization of the thirty-four “limbs” (uṟuppu) of poetical compositions. Those limbs are subdivided into several groups, which are examined in this article, particularly with a view to matching them with phenomena attested in the existing poetical corpus and to assessing how naturally they fit the Tamil language. This is followed by an examination of the relationship between the conceptions found in the Tolkāppiyam (and its first commentator, Iḷampūraṇar) and those found in later metrical treatises such as the Yāpparuṅkalam (and its commentary).

2015

Why and how languages change over time have been the major concerns of the historical linguistics. The Dravidian comparative linguistics in the last few decades has arrived at excellent results at different levels of language change: phonology, morphology and etymology. However the field of historical syntax remains to be explored in detail. Change or variation in word order type is one of the most important areas in the study of historical linguistics and language change. We can roughly identify two different views on the word order in Old Tamil: (1) Zvelebil claims in general a SOV word order, but adds “if not disturbed by stylistic or emphatic shifts…” (Zvelebil, K. 1997.43), (2) Andronov suggests a free word order (1991) and in a more recent work Suzan Herring proposes SOV as the basic order (Herring 2000). We are not sure to what extent the Greenbergian six-way typology (SOV/OSV/SVO/OVS/VSO/VOS), can be applied in the case of Old Tamil, despite its proved pertinence for several...

2014

"This article examines, from the perspective of the History of Linguistics, the specifications and the genesis of two distinct lists of four sets of words which are often found in the ancient shastric corpus of the Tamil-speaking South. One of those lists, which is found inside the “pure grammar” component of that technical literature, enumerates ‘nouns’ (peyarc col), ‘verbs’ (viṉaic col), ‘particles’ (iṭaic col), and uric col (lit. ‘appropriate words’), whereas the other list, which reflects the fact that one of the main aims of “grammar” was to describe literature, enumerates ‘simple words’ (iyaṟcol), tiricol (lit. ‘mutant words’ or ‘twisted words’), ‘regional words’ (ticaic col), and ‘Northern words’ (vaṭacol). In both lists, there is an item for which it is difficult to find a simple translation, namely uriccol for the first list and tiricol for the second list. T he difficulty in identifying and explaining the intention of those who coined those terms seems to be in part due to the fact that the texts which the Tamil tradition has transmitted to us are an assemblage of various parts that were once fragments of a “work in progress”, now fossilized, which was partly abandoned, either because another śāstra (that of lexicography) took over part of the descriptive effort, and/or because the ambition to compile a dhātu-pāṭha (the Sanskrit term for a list of verbal roots) for the Tamil language was abandoned, if such a project ever existed. The fact that discontinuities in the transmission of Tamil śāstric literature do exist is attested to, for instance, by the hesitation of traditional commentators, while explaining sūtra TP 385i (alias TP 392p), which is a characterization of marapu (approx. ‘usage’), said to be dependent on the power of ‘the four words’. The commentators are cautious in deciding which of the two lists of ‘four words’ is meant, possibly hoping to suggest that the sūtra might refer to both, because they believe in the “beauty of compromise”. [Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on South Asian Languages and Linguistics [ICOSAL], which took place at Moscow State University and Moscow University for the Humanities on 5-7 July 2012, edited by Alice Davidson, Hans Henrich Hock and Liudmila V. Khokhlova]"

[Updated data - November 2023] The Periya Tirumoḻi is the magnum opus among Tirumaṅkai Āḻvār's six mid-to late-8 th c. Tamil texts, 2 with 1084 quatrains and lines of varied length from four to eight feet, providing a unique oppportunity to access the grammar of its time in one text. The text falls in the Late Old Tamil period prior to 1000 C.E., a period Dr. Eva Wilden, professor at Hamburg University, characterized as developmental, exhibiting multiple morphological innovations. Included among these are the appearance of the present tense using kil-tal, changes in personal pronouns, varied conditional and imperative forms, and the proliferation of the plural suffix-kaḷ. 3 In the process of translating this text (currently accepted for publication by the École française d'Extrême-Orient), I collected all (I hope) of the occurrences of these and several other interesting structures to provide information on the status of the Tamil language at the time of composition and to perhaps assist in determining if, in fact, all of this text was written at the same time, in other words, by the same author. I have compiled this data for comparison and analysis by those scholars with the necessary knowledge, which I lack, and interest to do this work, and it is made available here as an amuse bouche while hungrily awaiting the full offering, the creation of an online searchable glossary of the entire corpus of the Vaiṣṇava Nālāyira Tivviyappirapaṇṭam 'The Four Thousand Divine Compositions' as currently being compiled by Dr. Erin McCann.